The present invention relates to the use of rehabilitation therapy that mimics walking (also referred to as, “walking therapy”). More specifically, the present invention relates to the use of a treadmill to provide walking therapy.
A number of disorders and injuries may cause an individual to experience complications when walking or render them unable to walk. For example, an individual may experience neurological damage due to stroke, spinal cord injury, etc. Walking therapy can help these individuals improve and/or regain their walk or gait. Such improvements may be the result of improving the training of muscle groups, improving kinesthetic awareness, and other related factors.
Walking therapy has traditionally been conducted with the help of two or more therapists that manually move a rehabilitee's legs to mimic walking motions. These traditional methods have a number of shortcomings. Among other things, these methods are very labor-intensive on the part of the physical therapists and can be subject to significant variability (e.g., due to different physical therapists working on different parts of a patient's legs, the inability to precisely control the gait of the patient's legs, etc.).
Generally, it is desirable to have more consistency when providing walking therapy. In some cases, consistency allows improvements to be more readily realized. In other cases, the results achieved are more accurate (e.g., because substantially the same muscle groups are repeatedly trained in substantially the same way, without undesirable variations, such as those occurring when a physical therapist's arms are tired, etc.). More recently, mechanically and/or robotically assisted devices that provide walking rehabilitation have been found to provide improved consistency.